Live Music
Archive
Librivox
Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Internet
Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American
Libraries
TV News
Understanding
9/11The Pocket Cephalometer, or Compass of Coordinates
Bookreader Item Preview
Share or Embed This Item
- Usage
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Topics
- Gustave Le Bon, Robert K. Stevenson, cephalometer, compass of coordinates, head diameters, head curves and angles, facial angle of Camper, cephalic index and angles, craniography, skull volume and circumference, profile of the face, profilemeter, 3-D copy of a solid figure
- Collection
- opensource
- Item Size
- 14.4M
A remarkable invention, the pocket cephalometer allowed one to quickly measure the head's various angles, diameters, and profiles. Invented in the 1870s by the famous French scientist, Doctor Gustave Le Bon, this instrument also permitted one to reproduce in 3-D any solid figure. Unlike other cephalic measuring devices at the time, which were bulky, the pocket cephalometer was portable; this portability feature greatly facilitated the research of anthropologists who visited foreign lands. Le Bon himself in 1881 used his pocket cephalometer invention to measure the heads of 50 inhabitants of the remote Tatras Mountains region of southern Poland. This paper by Le Bon is essentially a user's manual for his invention, and provides one an excellent idea as to how 19th Century anthropologists went about measuring their subjects' heads and skulls.
